Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/241

RhPROP. VII.———— A touch might sever the slender chord, and let her drop. But meanwhile she may remain suspended; for the stroke must come from ontology, and not from epistemology, and much has to be done before that stroke can be applied.

14. A few remarks must now be made on the second member of the proposition. If philosophers, in general, have been at a loss in regard to the constant and necessary factor of cognition, and unable to name it, they have been quite at home with the other, though less familiar, element and have experienced no difficulty in declaring what the variable and particular factor, for the most part, is. It is the complement of the phenomena of sense—the whole system of material things. This is the contingent and particular and fluctuating constituent of cognition. Matter is described by the old philosophers, in very plain terms, as that which is always inchoate, but never completed—as that which has no permanency—that which is subject to perpetual vicissitude, and afflicted with a chronic and incurable diarrhæa.

15. Here, however, there is still as usual some ground for perplexity, and it is occasioned by the old cause, the neglect to distinguish between things as known, and things as existent. When the old philosophers talk of material things as fluctuating and evanescent, do they mean that they are